In her new exhibition at the Galerie Volker Diehl, internationally acclaimed artist Susan Hiller explores extinct or threatened languages and the erosion of meaning in indigenous systems of signs and images. This exhibition is thematically linked with the presentation of Susan Hiller's works at the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (5 April - 15 Juni 2008).

The work in the exhibition centers around mysterious, archaic symbols Hiller discovered in various parts of the world. On her journeys through Ireland, France, North America and Australia, she compiled a photographic record of the traces left by prehistoric cultures engraved on rocks or in caves. Due to the extremely abstract nature of some of the images and our lack of knowledge about why they carved onto the rock, this collection of petroglyphs (images or patterns carved or engraved on rock surfaces) is presently regarded as indecipherable. The exhibited works are Piezo pigment prints which have been greatly enlarged and digitally modified by Hiller from small details in her photographs: a transformation process confronting the viewer with the magical and hallucinatory power of these weathered symbols. This is more than simply painstaking observation, it is also a highly personal meditation on lost meanings.

The exhibition gives both visual and acoustic expression to Hiller's preoccupation with the loss of meaning in signs transmitted solely in a material form, as if they were empty shells without signification. Her „Last Silent Movie“ (2007), shown in a second version at the Berlin Biennale, can be regarded as complementary to the images. In front of a projected black screen, the viewer hears the voices of men, women and children, all speaking in strange languages. They sing songs, narrate stories or recite lists of vocabulary. Others lament the injustice of allowing languages to die and be forgotten, addressing their complaints directly to the viewer. In an uncanny way, Hiller's acoustic choreography takes up the issue of the process of historical extinction und the fleeting nature of cultural transmission. The exhibition title „Journey to the Land of the Tarahumaras“ evokes the trip made by Antoine Artaud, surrealist poet and playwright, to the secluded and little-known Tarahumaran people in the north of Mexico in 1936.